


Experience

by the_dala



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Rape Aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 13:36:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/992589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_dala/pseuds/the_dala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will asks Jack for a story about his past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Experience

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for discussion of past underage rape.
> 
> I'm archiving my old PotC fic - this was originally published on November 22nd, 2003 (good lord, nearly ten years go). These earlier stories are compliant with CoBP canon only and somewhat rough compared to my later fic. But I like to do things in order, so I'm posting them chronologically.

Will lay in the captain’s bed with the captain’s arms around him, heavily sated by lovemaking and rum. He closed his eyes, reveling in the dark fingers stroking up and down his forearm, the chapped lips against his brow. So familiar. On a night like this, it was difficult to imagine a time in which his life had not been entwined with another, when he had not fallen asleep to the sound of that other heart beating a steady rhythm.

“Jack,” he murmured.

“Hmm?”

He had been thinking about something for several days now, and the languid mood in the cabin seemed the perfect environment in which to mention it. “Who was your first?”

Jack tapped his fingers against Will’s shoulder. “Male or female?”

“Which came first?”

“Male. Though female, far more frequently, after that.” Will snorted, remembering the whores’ welcome for Jack on their first trip to Tortuga.

“Tell me about it. Him. Whatever.”

He could feel Jack draw his head back to look down at him. His voice was curious and at the edge of amusement. "Why do you suddenly want to know this?”

Will shrugged. “Never been with anybody but you. I've just been wondering.”

Jack’s deep sigh lifted Will’s head on top of his chest and let it settle down again. “It’s a fair tale,” he warned.

“I’m not going anywhere right now,” Will assured him. “Nor ever.”

“You’ve had just enough drink to turn you sentimental, boy. Well, I’d have to start earlier back from the man I’d call my first lover. First time I took to the sea, I was thirteen –”

“Thirteen?!” Will interrupted indignantly. Jack pinched him.

“Do you want to hear the tale or don’t you?”

“Yes,” he replied sulkily.

“Then keep silent. I was thirteen, like I said, and figured myself a man grown enough to leave his father’s house. I stowed away aboard a merchant ship bound for the Indies, figuring I’d just pop up with the cabinboys and start learnin’ the ropes. I had read a lot of those boys’ adventure stories, and the lads in the tales were always befriended by kind, noble captains or rich merchants. Unfortunately before I could get a good start on my romantic adventure, one of those little brats turned me in to my captain. And I learned that not all were as heroic as I’d believed them to be.” His arms tightened around Will involuntarily, until Will had slight trouble breathing.

“He tied me to the mainmast, gathered the whole crew ‘round, and gave me twenty lashes. You’ve seen the marks.”

Will nodded, huddled against Jack’s chest. He had not anticipated his bedtime story taking this sort of turn.

“After...” Jack cleared his throat. “Sure you want to hear this?”

He had a fairly good idea of where the tale was headed. “Tell me, Jack.” Sliding his hand up Jack’s neck, he threaded his fingers through the long black hair and tried to think himself into a body made up entirely of warmth and comfort and affection. Jack’s hand squeezed his shoulder, and he thought he might have succeeded.

“After, he made it clear to the men that they were to do with me what they liked once they took me to the brig. Most of them were a decent sort, but three – three of them, two big and one wiry little bastard, came forward to drag me below deck. I fought them, to no avail. I was skinny and underfed and sorely outnumbered. Two of ‘em had me pinned while the little one...well.” He swallowed hard before continuing. “One of the lads I’d managed to make a friend of, in the crew’s quarters nursing a broken wrist that day, said he could hear me screamin’. I was beyond fight or flight at that point. Must’ve blacked out, I guess, because when I came to they had switched and one o’ the big ones was on me...” He did not finish so much as run out of will to continue.

“Oh, Jack...”

Jack shook his head in disbelief, as if his memories belonged to another and he was only an observer like Will. “Y’know, I’ve been in a lot of scrapes since then, lot of danger, lot of pain. But never in my life was I so sure that I was going to die as I was on that day.”

Will kissed his neck, light feather-brushes of his lips. He shivered, trying to imagine how it had been. He remembered well his own first time, months ago in this very bed. Jack had been slow and he had been tender, but it had still hurt. Back then Jack had been so young, and alone, and forced to it with no thought of his pain...Will hugged him tight and Jack smoothed Will’s loose hair away from his face.

“I got off that ship alive, but it was the end of what little trust in men I’d had. I knew for years before that I wanted men like I wanted women – more, even. ‘Twas one of the many things my da tried to beat out of me. But I wasn’t prepared to ever let another one touch me, no matter how many lasses I took to bed. Until some years later, when I had a ship and a crew of my own –”

“Is this where the happy ending starts?” Will wanted to know. His voice was husky and low.

“Thought I told you not to interrupt, whelp. Anyway, that’s all up to interpretation, I guess. So I was captain of this ship, and my first mate was a good man some years older than I. He let me know that he wanted me, but though I wasn’t above a bit of teasing, I shied away from all serious offers, his included. Finally, after months of dancin’ around each other, he asked me flat who had done me harm. He wasn’t talking physical, o' course, but I told him, shouting it at him, because I thought he wouldn’t want anything to do with me if he knew. I was wrong, it ended with him more determined than ever. Took a lot of time and patience, but eventually he was the one taught me how it could be done right, with pleasure where there’d been only pain before.”

“That’s a good lesson,” said Will, rubbing his nose in the hollow of Jack’s throat.

“It was indeed.”

Fingertips idly circling one of Jack’s nipples, Will asked gently, “Where is he now?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, he took a turn toward the end. The ambition that drew me to him in the first place became greed and power-madness. He also grew jealous over a friendship I took up with another crewman, and let it color his decisions as my second-in-command. I wasn’t sorry to part from him.”

“What was his name?”

Jack’s hands, roving over Will’s back, went still for an instant. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

“You do realize that now you _have_ to tell me, just for saying that.”

Jack sighed. Will felt his chin fall back from its resting place in Will’s hair as Jack flung his head flat on the pillow.

“The ship was the _Black Pearl_. The man was Hector Barbossa.”

Will nearly gave himself whiplash from craning his neck up to look at Jack. The older man’s eyes were worn and sad.

“You have got to be joking.”

“‘Tis no joke. Though often I wish it were.”

He attempted to see if he was disgusted by the thought of Jack bedding the cursed pirate, or if he was mad with jealousy. But the idea was so impossible that he could not feel anything about it at all.

“But how –”

Jack’s voice was sharp. “I’ve just told you how.”

Will was still wondering at this new window into Jack’s past. “The friend – it was my father, wasn’t it?”

Jack nodded. “He thought Bill and I were hiding an affair.” An unspoken question hung in the air between them. Jack answered it forthrightly.

“I never desired to be anything more to your father, Will. He had you and your mother to think of, after all. But we had an easy friendship and Barbossa was suspicious no matter how I tried to persuade him it was untrue.”

Will quickly used this new information as a filter for the bits of the tale he’d thought he already knew: Barbossa’s mutiny, his father’s defiance and subsequent fate, Jack standing on an island with one shot in his pistol, watching Barbossa sail away on his _Pearl_...

“That enough for tonight, lad?” Jack asked softly.

Sitting up in bed, Will drew Jack against him, the beads in Jack’s hair clicking quietly between their bodies. “I’m sorry, Jack. About – about everything, and for asking you to tell it –”

“No,” Jack said into his neck, voice muffled, “I was going to tell you anyhow, at some point. Thought it was something you deserved to know.”

“Thank you.”

Pulling him back down, Jack retorted, “You can thank me by lettin' me go to sleep.”

“No arguments here,” said Will agreeably, settling onto his side with Jack stretched out against his back. They generally started out the night in that position, though by morning all available limbs would be in a haphazard tangle.

He was tired, more from Jack’s tale than from their previous activities. Yet as Jack’s breathing gradually slowed into sleep, Will found himself unable to do the same. He groped for Jack’s hand, attached to the arm thrown lazily over his ribs. Jack had long, slender hands. As far as bone structure went, they were comparable to Elizabeth’s. Upon touching them, however, no one would mistake them for a lady’s; they were marked by years of wind and sun, water and rope. Scarred, but bearing those scars proudly, and truly good underneath their wear – rather like the man himself.

Jack was right. Drinking that particular allotment of rum did make him embarrassingly sentimental.

No one was awake to witness his thoughts, however, except for the great ship creaking in the wind while she sheltered her slumbering crew and captain. As if cued by Will’s thoughts, Jack began to snore quietly. Will smiled at his own private endearment.

When they had first starting sleeping together, they fought often. Will was still smarting from Elizabeth’s rejection. She had known it all long before he had; she had told him that while she had finished her adventure, his was still across the horizon, and he needed to be free to chase it. They loved one other, but it would not be enough to cross that kind of rift. He had been heartbroken at the time, but he understood her words now and knew she had been right. By the time a week was up on his first real journey on the _Black Pearl_ , he was waking up from dreams of Jack’s hands and mouth traveling his body, and by the end of the second week, he had managed to get drunk enough to work up the nerve to kiss him sloppily before passing out on the deck. They’d ended up in bed together before they were really ready for it. Will thought Jack considered him a helpless puppy still and was only toying with him until a better offer came along; he was also nervous about his considerable lack of experience. Jack was afraid that Will was going to abandon him for the first pretty girl he saw at the first harbor they entered. So they fought, and they reconciled with sex, and fought again and made up again, at a fairly constant rate until one particulary rough morning. They had shouted and blustered; Jack threw a wine goblet at his mirror and broke it, prompting Will to grab a few things and go sleep in a hammock in the galley. But when he had hunkered down and let his temper cool, the heavy silence pressed upon him. It took him the better part of an hour to realize that the sound he was missing was Jack’s snoring – the obnoxious racket that had kept him awake and murderous on more than one night, especially in the first few weeks. Now he was alone, without it and without Jack’s warm body beside him, and he couldn’t even close his eyes. Blanket under one arm, he trudged back to Jack’s cabin. The captain was lying on his bunk, still fully dressed, staring at the ceiling. When Will entered sheepishly, he sat up and they said “I’m sorry” at once, the first time either of them had ever actually apologized after a row. He had sat down in the chair opposite the bed and they had talked for hours, haltingly at first, but with growing ease. Then they had made love just before dawn and slept till noon, and things had been better ever since. It was still no easy life, out at sea, constantly under each other’s feet, but somehow it worked. It was something they had created all on their own, and Will was exceedingly proud of it.

Will sat bolt upright. He took his companion by the shoulder and shook him gently.

“Wake up!”

Jack groaned and shoved outward in Will’s general direction. “Shaddup.”

“Jack, please.”

He turned over, facing away from Will, and pulled a pillow over his head. “C‘n wait till mornin’.”

“No,” Will insisted, “it can’t.” He waited, but it seemed Jack was not going to be accomodating. That didn’t matter.

“I love you.”

With a slowness that was almost comical, Jack removed the pillow and twisted his upper body to stare incredulously at the boy. “What – what did you say?”

Will kissed him. “I love you,” he repeated. “That’s all I wanted to say.” He scooted beneath the covers once more, putting his arms around Jack and pressing his face into Jack’s neck.

He had almost dozed off, some five minutes later, when Jack spoke. His voice was just above a whisper. He sounded younger than Will himself, and he sounded panicked.

“I love you too. You know that, don’t you? Will?" A poke in his stomach. "Do you?”

“Mmmm,” Will replied with a yawn, “I know it, savvy?”

"Insolent brat," Jack replied, satisfied that a big fuss was not going to be made over something that, really, they’d been saying for a long time without words. “G'night, Will Turner, the eunuch with a very large...tunic.”

Will smiled against Jack’s skin. "Good night, Jack."


End file.
